Last year I was living with my dad in Colorado and we figured a drive back to my hometown of St. Louis was in order. Much of his family remains in the area, and I hadn’t been back there since we left for Oregon in 1985. After a few quiet days in Glen Carbon, Illinois at his brother’s place, I became restless and took his Camry for a sojourn.

click on pictures to embiggen

I knew of East St. Louis’ reputation so I headed that direction, camera in tow.

So many brick buildings and houses. Hardly any of that out west.

A handyman’s delight.

Anyone care to call and ask how much they want?

I still miss my first-gen LS400.

Entertainment is sparse.

Finally some cars.

The car seemed nicely cared for. That was about it.

Brooklyn’s finest.

A few blocks from the cop shop.

An old church?

Some fine American iron.

I suddenly felt right at home. Love those late 70’s Toyota paint schemes.

45 Comments

I have mixed feelings about seeing an article like this on a site like this. Old automotive factories or something yes, but I dislike commenting about others’ misfortune. Too much social commentary can get out of hand here.

I was forced to live slightly to the east, in Mascoutah IL, must say the area has not changed that much since ’69. Always found the mid-west one hell of an ugly place. Really do not see what has changed in all those years. Sad, sad,sad country.

The St. Louis area on the Illinois side? Yes, it’s unfortunate as I’ve been to East St. Louis and Mascoutah. However, extrapolating a finite area and applying it to the entire mid-west (or any other part of a country) probably isn’t the best basis for doing so.

I disagree. This interested me and I appreciate the lack of political opinions. The author was careful to steer clear of drawing assumptions from what he saw.

I don’t see anything wrong here. Mike did not take delight in other people’s misfortune: he merely documented what he saw. Seeing stuff like this reminds me how blessed I am to be living where I am and to be careful not to take things for granted.

Wow, I had no idea is was that bad there! Remember when Clark Griswold stopped to ask for directions there and got “Honky Lips” graffiti’d on the car?

But seriously, that looks how I imagine parts of Detroit! When we drove through St. Louis last summer (and stopped to try to figure out how to get to the arch while some sort of huge festival was taking place and everything was blockaded), parts of it looked not so great, but nothing like these pics.

My dad grew up in East St Louis in the 40’s and 50’s. It was a blue collar, middle to lower middle class place then, but spiraled downhill in the 60’s and 70’s (much like Detroit). East St. Louis is not to be confused with St. Louis. It’s a completely separate city on the other side of the river. It is definitely unfair to think this is representative of “the midwest”. Certainly some of the formerly industrial inner cities look like this, as they do also in the northeast, but drive though the parts of town you normally avoid and you will find blight in just about every major city in the country. Personally I found the article interesting. I wouldn’t mind the occasional geographic posting, just so long as there is a minimal car connection (like this one) and it is not too frequent.

Too bad about other’s misfortunes, blah da blah da blah. But these places are the dangerous hellholes as depicted above. And it is not just the very distinctive (and remote from the better off cities across the river) East St. Louis. This blight can be easily seen in many formerly prosperous working towns: Rockford; Gary; Flint; Detroit; Kenosha; Dayton; Cleveland; Memphis; Kansas City, Kansas. It ain’t pretty back there and it will never get better.

The former Buick store is striking to me. These cities had thriving car dealerships with, in many cases, beautiful structures. Much of that has been long ago abandoned or destroyed.

Kenosha should NOT be on that list. Yes, there are some abandoned industrial sites and a few less than savory neighborhoods that you would be likely to find in any 100,000 population urban area. However, the city fathers have largely not allowed this to happen, and have repurposed many former industrial sites. That is what will eventually happen with the 109 acre former AMC/Chrysler site which, while empty, has been cleaned up quite nicely.

There has never been anything in Kenosha that looks like East St. Louis.

Kenosha recovered from the loss of AMC plant. It now has 100K people, gaining on Green Bay, and is considered part of Chicago Metro area. It’s got new condos in place of the AMC plant and has new subdivisions, its not land locked like older towns in east.

If you want to know more about the atrocity that is East St. Louis, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities.”

I will give you a fair warning though: his work will encourage you to run to your nearest mental health professional and obtain a prescription for Zoloft, because the subject matter is extremely depressing.

Yes. There was a big Chevy plant on St. Louis’s North Side (on Goodfellow), not more than 5 miles west of here. Until the early 80s they made pickup trucks and Corvettes. Ford and Chrysler also ad big assy plants on the STL side as well, for a very long time.

A long time has gone by since then so who knows if those cars are remnants of GM lifer families, or, more likely, they are just very abundant and very cheap to buy.

The same types of photos could be run about Detroit. Or Chicago. Or to a lesser extent, Buffalo. Or many older Eastern, Southern and Midwestern cities.

Urban decay and the flight of prosperous former residents (and not just WASP or Euro-Americans, either) is a complex problem; and discussing the cures involves controversial politics. I’ll say no more, except that it will keep on happening until we first agree on an approach; and then adjust or discard it when/if it fails.

If you are from Colorado, you should be familiar with all the old ghost towns around there. What you are looking at is the same thing, just newer. East St. Louis isn’t all that different from what a lot of old Colorado towns went through over the years. Did you ever see what Cripple Creek went through? Unlike East St. Louis, with it’s 80,000 peak population, Cripple Creek used to be bigger. After the mines closed in the Cripple Creek area, the city became abandoned. During the Great Depression, a lot of the old railroad tracks and anything left standing was torn down for scrap metal.

Colorado is full of cities with similar boom and bust history as East St. Louis. The reasons for the boom and bust, are similar. The blight left behind is also similar. Instead of picturesque log cabins, you have more modern buildings. Instead of mountains of polluted streams, underground reservoirs of toxic sludge, and miles of abandoned collapsing mine shafts, East St. Louis and modern ghost towns have abandoned factories, stores, churches, auto dealerships, supermarkets and broken down homes. Just like in Colorado.

In fifty more years, East St. Louis and other modern ghost towns will look better because a lot of the abandoned buildings will have fallen down. The building scraps will have been hauled away and nature will have returned. It will take on an entirely different appearance, similar to the abandoned towns in Colorado.

When the Colorado towns were abandoned, there wasn’t a federal government that made everyone feel like it is their fault that the towns died. Grover Cleveland didn’t do a tour of dying mining towns and claim that Washington could turn it around. When mines closed down and laid off all the miners, there wasn’t a governor making political hay out of it. When folks by the thousands abandoned these towns, there wasn’t a bunch of media types blaming us.

So don’t look upon today’s ghost towns and shake your head. Don’t point a finger of blame at anyone. What you are photographing is little different that what has happened in a free market economy for hundreds of years. Don’t use this as a hammer to beat someone over the head.

Actually, the first time I was in Cripple Creek it was six weeks before the referendum…what was it, change in the State Constitution?…that allowed gambling in economically-distressed districts. I was traveling through, sleeping mostly in the back of my Datsun King Cab, and stumbled into Cripple Creek at sundown. I expected a total ghost town, but there was one tavern open, and I went in. Had a good old verbose time with the locals, over the gambling issue.

Went to bed in the truck bed, next morning took some photos and moved on.

Six years later, I was getting out of the Nav, and settling in Denver. Went to Cripple Creek on a weekend…I didn’t recognize the place. SEWERS going in! I couldn’t FIND the bar I had been drinking in!

Last time was last September. I’ve long since moved away; become a “Boomer” (itinerant railroader) mostly working in the Midwest. On vacation; on my cycle; shooting for the Four Corners. Stopped overnight in Cripple Creek.

The sewers are long in and the town’s settled down, of course…but I’m reminded of the platoon commander in Vietnam: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it…”

Is this the same? I think not. Western mining-town boom-and-bust ghosts…the people move away. The buildings (before ATVs and snowmobiles) used to collapse from weather and neglect.

St. Louis is being TORN APART…one copper wire at a time. Detroit is being TORCHED…a firebug, a match, a plastic jug of Blue Sunoco.

That isn’t natural. That’s deranged. That’s a society coming apart at the seams.

No one is to blame. Blaming someone on urban decay is accepting a myth that it is preventable. It isn’t. It never has been preventable. The idea that a city is to always grow is not realistic. A gold mining town cannot grow without gold. An urban industrial town cannot grow without industry. That is life.

St. Louis is only 1/3rd the size it was sixty years ago. East St. Louis only existed as a suburb when St. Louis was the country’s fourth largest city and cannot exist now that St. Louis is the country’s fifty-fourth largest city.

America has been full of ghost towns ever since Jamestown was found abandoned five hundred years ago. America is successful when it grows faster than it dies. When we focus on the dying towns, we begin to see a future of failure. Don’t do that. Focus on the successful cities with a future. That is what we’ve always done.

Colorado’s ghost towns have either been rediscovered, renovated and reoccupied, or lost to the winds. Unless they’re out on the eastern plains, where the real ghost towns linger. You’ll be hearing the name of one of them more often– Haswell. Intel has randomly selected that place name as the name of its newest laptop processor chip. But even that out-of-the-blue-sky event won’t change the future of a tiny town with no reason to live (once the automatic gas pump was perfected). This town was within 50 miles of me for the 30- plus years I’ve lived in Denver, and I’d never heard of it. The plight (there’s that word again) of the Great Plains can’t be compared to the long sleepy era of early-20th century Aspen. There’s no scenery to sell, and each town looks about the same. The water’s going, or gone. It’s hard to see what will bring these towns back to life.

+1 VD. That’s the trouble with documenting urban decay. Viewed from a distance, it’s poignant and makes you want to know the stories of the people still living there. Viewed emotionally, it’s tempting to attribute it to one of any number of the social or political -isms that exert influence on a country, and the image itself takes a back seat.

I do apologize for my too quick condemnation of Kenosha; if what is indicated is true I then stand corrected.

Rockford, on the other hand, is truly hopeless – though it does have still elegant neighborhoods and beautiful greenery. Yet there are many square miles of derelict urban blight there – from the near northwest side all through the west side of the river as well as the east side near and far south areas adjacent to the river. The city’s manufacturing base is a tiny fraction of what it was in the past and many former factories are abandoned hulks. The downtown core is purely government; there is no viable commerce – though on the near east side and farther out in the east there are vibrant local and national retailers. There are many destroyed homes, crack houses, very dangerous streets, etc.

There is a Chrysler plant about 15 miles to the east making the Dart. There is still some remaining aerospace business but most of the machine tool manufacturing is gone and skilled labor is no longer needed in Rockford.

As for St. Louis: there were both GM and Chrysler plants there at one time. In fact the Corvette was built at St. Louis. I believe both are gone now.

For the topic of urban geography and changing times, may I suggest the fine web site newgeography.com?

I think everybody is saddened to see many parts of the region in decay. ESL has always been the areas poster child for fraud, abuse and neglect. What particularly saddens people the most is that so many people who live there are in poverty, and also (due to its prime location) the continued real missed opportunity to build a really nice place right across from the STL riverfront.

I’ve always been impressed with this site because of the quality of the writing, the passion the authors and readers have for all things auto, and perhaps most importantly, the overall positive tenor of the discussion.

I appreciate the authors intent here, but I’d vote for sticking with cars and passing on anything touching on non-auto social commentary and politics. Plenty of sites out there for folks who want to engage in the culture war.

I’m dead against turning CC into anything political, and I know the community here is pretty much in agreement with me. Notice the lack of name-calling and political flames in the comments.

This is a one-off kind of deal, anyway. I only submitted it to Paul due to the fact that he’s never run anything like it, which is what I sort of specialize in. My posts have run the gamut from death to cats that look like Hitler.

Being from STL, this is nothing new to me – just things running their course.

You want to know what’s scary? Getting stuck in E. STL at 1 am because I took the wrong ramp off southbound I-70 looking for S. I-55 to take a date home! I wasn’t familiar with that route as I lived in north county back then (1976).

I learned quick, and my 1976 Chevy C-20 never moved so fast! We got out with nary a scratch!

I recall reading maybe 20 years ago that the three most blighted cities in the US were (in no particular order) Camden, NJ, Benton Harbor, MI and East St. Louis, IL. I have never been to the other two, but once spent about an hour driving lost around Camden trying to find the right interstate to get back on. Scary.

It is a fascinating topic to me what it is about a locality that allows it so sink into such a state, where another similar area manages to pull out or at least not sink so far.

As for the cars, it has always seemed that places like this are where the most durable cars are revealed. Very little Japanese stuff, certainly no European. Very little of the stuff that the American industry spent all its money on since the 80s. Mostly the rock-simple GM rwd stuff that is cheap to fix and will soldier along in really bad shape. Back in the 80s there was a lot of old Mopar stuff in these places. No more.

I think you listed it correctly with Camden, NJ at the top. We here in the Philly area like having Camden across the river, as it makes the worst parts of Philly look pretty damn good in comparison. 🙂

I also think your assessment of the cars in these areas is mostly correct, but the most important factor is being cheap to acquire in the first place. In the Midwest where domestics are more prevalent, you don’t see the Asian brands. But come to the economically depressed areas in the cities of the east and you will see plenty of 5 year old Kias and Hyundais and even 10+ year old Hondas and Toyotas. But yes, of the domestic brands in these areas it will be the panthers, B bodies and pickups.

Interesting dialogue to all. I am mesmerized by industrial ruin, from abandoned factories and their impact to ‘deadmalls’. To watch Detroit go through it’s death throes is amazing in a sense; I won’t be judgmental but wonder about how different things would have been if alternative decisions were made 40, 50 60 years ago.

ESL is a mess, but Brooklyn is arguably worse. Most of the village’s revenue comes from “adult entertainment” in various guises. Not a great place to get pulled over by the boys in blue…as I did in a brand new Kia Rio that had a little crack in the windshield, above the inside rearview mirror…got a ticket for “faulty safety equipment” and had to contribute $100 to Brooklyn’s coffers.

Don’t forget Sauget. 4.5 square miles of strippers, toxic waste, (the town’s original name was Monsanto) strippers, minor league baseball, (actually a fun time at a very nice little ballpark) strippers, a venue for washed-up big name ’80s hair bands and……strippers. What more could a community with 250 residents possibly need?